Tuesday, 16 March 2010

I read an article by Daniel O'Leary today while I was praying and I had to share.It really helped me to continue to reflect on what Fr Brendan shared with us yesterday.Enjoy :)

"As Henri Nouwen wrote, we must live through our wounds instead of thinking them through. 'It is better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, to let them into your silence. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them though and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds'.

Instead we cover the hurts of our hearts with the bandages of the mind. We bury our painful emotions and think that they are dead. We forget that out presence and personalities are profoundly influenced and shaped by these underground and often violent realities. We live and act out of the invisible shadowworld that turns, silently, within us. Pain needs light. Nothing heals in the dark. Michael Leunig writes:

When the heart is cut or cracked or brokenDo not clutch it, let the wound lie openLet the wind from the good old sea blow inTo bathe the wound with salt and let it sting.

The scars of Jesus, inside and out, were always there for all to see. He let Mary wash them, Thomas touch them, his mother hold them. he openly wept, openly cursed, openly blessed. He mourned losses with others, he was angry in a crowded temple, he carried his cross in public places. His was a transparent life. And it cost. He was always dying so as to achieve that state. Nothing less will do for us.

In Lent we grow by dying. There is no other way. In this dying we recognise the false face we've grown used to, the daily lies we tell, the thoughts of deception that cross our minds, the infidelities we do not commit only because we might get caught, the lovelessness of our lives parading as shallow compassion, our collusion with conformity, our fear of beauty and big dreams Nowhere else but in this awareness of our sins, can we ever be reached and saved. We die to self when we sweat blood to stay faithful, when we sacrifice the ego of our vanity for the essence of our truest being.

This is the dying that daily scrapes the self-renewing fat of pride from the ribs of our soul bringing a fearless, inner lightness and clarity. When the eye is unblocked, the Buddhists tell us, the vision is sure. This is the liberating dying that puts the truth in our eyes, the resonance in our voice, the power in our presence, the depth in our listening. Since we are now connected up inside, our heart is no longer divided. Rinsed and cauterised, all that is unauthentic is zapped from our infected being. When the small gods go, God arrives. Heaven, in the end, is where we belong."